Agora vs Stream
Discover how Agora compares to Stream, and understand which is right for your use case, based on dimensions such as scalability, pricing, security, and their chat features.
What is Agora?
Agora offers realtime communication services through APIs, enabling developers to integrate voice, video, and live-streaming features into mobile, desktop, and web applications.
What is Stream?
Stream is a platform for building scalable, realtime chat and activity feed applications. It provides APIs and SDKs to easily integrate messaging, video calls, and social feeds into apps.
Compare Agora and Stream
Let’s compare Agora and Stream, looking at key elements of their offering such as their scalability, pricing, security and chat feature set.
| Scalability | |||
Concurrent connections | Number of users that can be supported in a single chat. | Agora 10,000 users supported per chat room. | Stream 2500 users supported in a single chat. Supported within Start and Elevate packages. Overages apply if you exceed plan quota - $0.79 per additional concurrent user. Read more |
Connections | Number of connections that can be handled across the platform. | Agora Unknown. | Stream |
Channels / rooms | Number of channels or rooms that can be handled across the platform. | Agora Unlimited. | Stream Unlimited. |
Messages | Number of messages that can be handled across the platform. | Agora Unknown. | Stream Unlimited. |
Message throughput | Number of messsages that can be published per second. | Agora Unknown. | Stream 5 messages per second. When concurrent connections exceeds 100 in a group messages are throttled to 5 per second. |
| Data integrity | |||
Guaranteed message delivery | Ensures messages are never lost during transmission, even in the presence of network disruptions. | Agora No | Stream No |
Guaranteed message ordering | Maintains the sequence of messages as they were sent. This is particularly important in apps where the chronological order of messages is essential for meaningful communication. | Agora No | Stream No |
Exactly-once message delivery | Guarantees that each message is processed exactly once, preventing data inconsistencies that can arise from duplicate processing or missing messages. | Agora No | Stream No |
| Performance & availability | |||
Uptime Guarantee | An uptime guarantee instills confidence in the reliability of the service and protects your business from the negative impacts of downtime. | Agora Agora guarantees an SLA uptime of 99.95%. | Stream
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Global edge network | By bringing servers (Points of Presence, or PoP) geographically closer to the devices of end users, and routing requests to the nearest PoP, global latency is reduced to a minimum. | Agora Yes Agora operates a global network (SD-RTN) of over 200 data centers spread across multiple regions, including the United States, Europe, China, Japan, India, and the Asia Pacific. Read more | Stream Yes Stream has data centers located around the world, including:
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Multi-region data replication (message durability) | By replicating data across multiple regions, the risk of data loss or downtime is greatly mitigated since if data is lost or a server fails in one region, the information can be retrieved from another. | Agora Yes | Stream No |
No single point of failure or congestion | Having no single point of failure means a system is resilient and can continue to operate even if one part fails. Avoiding a single point of congestion ensures messages flow efficiently across the system and avoids bottlenecks that could lead to performance issues under load. | Agora Yes Agora global data centers have superior routing capabilities to ensure that the network services are not interrupted due to a single point of failure. Read more | Stream Yes Stream's chat infrastructure does not rely on a single data center due to global edge network support, thus avoiding a single point of failure and congestion. |
Latency | Low latency is crucial for realtime apps as it ensures swift and efficient data transmissions, providing a smoother and more responsive user experience. | Agora The average end-to-end global latency for Agora is 300 milliseconds. Read more | Stream Stream does not provide a global latency figure. However, it achieves a region-based average roundtrip latency of 170 ms between Amsterdam and the US East. |
Server-side batching | Reduces the overall message count, lowers costs, and mitigates the risk of hitting rate limits during high-throughput scenarios. | Agora No | Stream |
Connection state recovery | Automatically re-establish failed connections and replay missed messages. | Agora Yes Agora supports reconnection and state recovery mechanisms through the Agora SDK, which automatically tries to re-establish connections if a user drops offline. | Stream Yes Stream SDKs automatically attempt to recover the connection and ensure that a connection to Stream chat is always kept alive. That chat state is recovered when the user's internet connection comes back online. |
| Ecosystem support | |||
Supported realtime protocols | Support for multiple protocols provides the flexibility to choose a protocol that best suits your project’s requirements. | Agora
| Stream WebSocket. |
Supported languages | Supporting multiple languages and platforms offers greater flexibility when building cross-platform realtime apps. | Agora
| Stream
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| Chat room types | |||
Multi-type chat support (group, DM, supergroups) | Enables chat experiences to be tailored to various user needs, from one-on-one to large, scalable group discussions. | Agora
| Stream Stream provides the following chat room types:
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| Chat room management | |||
Presence | Maintaining a view of which users are connected, and their associated metadata, enables their online status to be updated in realtime. | Agora Yes | Stream Yes |
Occupancy | High-level metrics about the clients currently connected to a channel make it simple to show things such as connected user count, or display which channels are the most popular. | Agora No | Stream No |
Typing indicators | Show when others are typing in a chat room, enhancing realtime communication flow. | Agora Yes Agora’s Chat SDK allows you to build fully-featured messaging experiences for your users, including typing indicators. Read more | Stream Yes Stream supports typing indicators, which appear on the channel list item where someone is typing or in the chat channel view. |
Room reactions | Customize the chat environment with reactions and other shared room states. | Agora Yes | Stream No |
| Chat message attributes | |||
Message edits and deletes | Allow users to modify or remove messages. | Agora Yes | Stream Yes |
Message reactions & emoticons | Boost engagement by enabling users to quickly express emotions or feedback on messages. | Agora Yes Agora allows you to react with up to 20 emoji reactions in a single message during one-to-one chats and group chats. Read more | Stream Yes |
Rich text support | Enhance messages with rich text formatting in chat. | Agora No | Stream Yes Stream SDKs offer markdown formatting for channel messages. |
Media attachments | Support for sharing images, videos, and files in chat. | Agora | Stream Yes |
| Chat application and user state | |||
In-app notifications | Notify users of important events from other chat rooms without them leaving the current chat, keeping them engaged and informed. | Agora No | Stream Partial Stream only supports in-app notification feeds. |
Role-based permissions | Control user roles and permissions to ensure proper access and moderation. | Agora | Stream Yes |
UI kit | Customizable UI elements for a seamless chat integration. | Agora Yes Agora provides open-source chat UI kits on GitHub for iOS, Android, and Web, which you can clone and run. Read more | Stream Yes Stream offers UI kits for social media design and chat interfaces. |
| Storage and history | |||
Synchronous - automated moderation | Detect and manage harmful content automatically, before the message is broadcast to participants. | Agora Yes Moderation is done through Microsoft Azure, and is not enabled by default. To get access, you need either a Pro or Enterprise plan. | Stream Yes |
Asynchronous - automated moderation | Detect and manage harmful content automatically, after the message is broadcast to participants. | Agora Yes | Stream |
Manual moderation via dashboards | Tools for moderators to detect harmful messages and manage them effectively. | Agora Yes Agora's console allows moderators to manually view the report items and address the messages and message senders according to their content policy. Read more | Stream Yes Stream offers manual moderation capabilities through its Chat Dashboard, which allows you to do standard moderation tasks. Read more |
Ban users | Remove problematic users from the chat to maintain a healthy environment. | Agora Yes | Stream Yes |
| Dev tools | |||
Programmatic management | Enables the automation of provisioning, management, and testing of service resources, simplifying integration with existing development workflows such as CI. | Agora Yes | Stream Yes |
| Pricing | |||
Pricing model | The pricing model should align with your project's expected load, usage patterns, and budget in order to be cost-effective and efficient. | Agora Agora provides pay-as-you-go pricing based on the number of participant minutes, messages per month, and MAUs for chat. Read more | Stream Stream's pricing plan is based on MAUs. Overages apply for additional MAU's and peak concurrent connection - over set quota. Read more |
Pricing illustration | An example price based on 5 live streaming chat events and 50K attendees. | Agora $2349,
| Stream $22,186.50.
Note: Assumes same users attend each event, to keep MAU at minimum. |
Free plan | With a free plan, you can test the service’s functionality and compatibility with your project before committing to a paid plan. | Agora Yes Agora's free plan offers 10k minutes/month. | Stream Yes Offers:
|
Pricing plans | The pricing plans offered by cost. | Agora
| Stream
Overages:
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| Support for additional realtime features | |||
Pub/Sub messaging | Reduces communication code complexity, simplifying the process of building highly functional and architecturally complex realtime apps. | Agora Yes Agora's message channels use the pub/sub model, allowing you to publish messages to a channel or subscribe to receive them without pre-creating the channel. Read more | Stream No |
Collaboration capabilities | Enables you to quickly integrate realtime collaborative features like live cursors, member location, avatar stacks, and component locking. | Agora No | Stream No |
Database sync capabilities | Database sync capabilities enable realtime updates between your database and UI, ensuring the UI reflects changes in the database instantly, with data consistency, and without the need for polling. | Agora No | Stream No |
Notifications | Send notifications directly to users screens, from chat responses to news alerts, or game updates, whether or not an application is open and running. | Agora Yes | Stream Yes |
Asset tracking | State-of-the-art asset tracking across last mile logistics, food delivery applications, and urban mobility services. | Agora Yes Agora provides rich media messages that support GPS locations, allowing you to track assets. | Stream No |
| Integrations & interoperability | |||
AI models | Allows you to integrate AI models, like GPT, into your app. | Agora Yes Agora provides integration with OpenAI models AI for its conversational AI SDK developed in partnership with OpenAI. Read more | Stream Yes Stream supports integration with AI models from OpenAI, HuggingFace, Claude, or any LLM for its chat and voice AI SDKs. |
Serverless functions | Enables integration with third-party cloud providers by facilitating the execution of custom code against messages to perform business logic like on-the-fly translation. | Agora No | Stream No |
Streaming & queueing | Provides a dependable method to reroute messages from the service to third-party streams and queues for further processing. | Agora No | Stream No |
Observability services | Enables realtime monitoring and troubleshooting by offering insights into service behavior directly in your observability platform of choice. | Agora Yes Agora analytics integrates with Datadog to provide monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services. Read more | Stream No |
| Security & compliance | |||
API key authentication | Simplifies the authentication code on trusted servers compared to requesting, managing, and refreshing tokens. | Agora No Agora uses token-based authentication for user authentication, rather than API keys. Users authenticate through Access Tokens, which are generated using the app's credentials. Read more | Stream Yes Stream uses API keys for authentication. You must include an API key when sending an authenticated request to Stream. |
Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication | SSO streamlines login processes, boosts security by minimizing password use, and meets compliance needs for secure data access management. | Agora Yes | Stream Yes Stream offers Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication through GitHub Organizations and SAML 2.0. The SSO is available to organizations on Stream's Enterprise Chat or Feeds plan. Read more |
Rules for permissions and operations | Provides control over which users can subscribe and publish to certain channels. | Agora Yes | Stream Yes Stream applications offer customizable built-in roles. Users receive a role with permissions for the whole app and can also have channel-specific roles for single or multiple channels of the same type. |
End-to-end encryption | Ensures that the data transmitted between the client and the API server remains confidential and secure while in transit. | Agora Yes Agora implements E2EE for its messages through its signaling SDK, which has a built-in AES 256 GCM encryption algorithm. Read more | Stream No Stream does not natively implement E2EE. It encrypts messages in transit using TLS 1.2 and at rest with AES256. Read more |
Compliance | Compliance with regulations can impact your ability to meet legal obligations in your industry. | Agora
| Stream Stream is compliant with five standards and regulations to ensure the security and privacy of its users' data:
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Disclaimer: This comparison was created based on documentation and resources freely available online about Agora and Stream. The content was last updated on 16 May 2025 for Agora and on 1 May 2025 for Stream. Be sure to double-check everything before you make any decisions. If you do find anything incorrect or out of date, then please let us know.
Alternatives to Agora and Stream
While both Agora and Stream are worth considering as options for realtime experiences, they aren’t without their limitations. We suggest evaluating them against the following alternatives to make sure you find the right solution for your needs.
Alternatives to Agora
Sendbird offers APIs and SDKs for live chat, realtime messaging, push notifications, and calls with WebSocket connections, UI kits, and backend integrations.
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
Twilio is a platform that provides developers with a suite of communication tools for building messaging infrastructure in their applications.
Alternatives to Stream
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. Serving more WebSocket connections than any other pub/sub platform on earth. Businesses trust us to power their critical applications - reliably, securely and at serious scale.
Sendbird offers APIs and SDKs for live chat, realtime messaging, push notifications, and calls with WebSocket connections, UI kits, and backend integrations.
PubNub is a developer API platform that powers the realtime infrastructure in apps to build engaging Virtual Spaces where online communities can connect.
Discover how Agora and Stream stack up against Ably
Ably is the definitive realtime experience platform of the internet. See how we compare to Agora and Stream on key dimensions such as core features, pricing, integrations, QoS, performance, and security and compliance.
Try Ably for free to discover the benefits for yourself
Ably has built reliable realtime infrastructure so you don’t have to. On our free plan you benefit from:
- 6M monthly messages
- 200 concurrent channels
- 200 concurrent connections
